Please note: we have been online over ten years, and we want The Trek BBS to continue as a free site. But if you block our ads we are at risk.Please consider unblocking ads for this site - every ad you view counts and helps us pay for the bandwidth that you are using. Thank you for your understanding.

Welcome! The Trek BBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans. Please login to see our full range of forums as well as the ability to send and receive private messages, track your favourite topics and of course join in the discussions.

If you are a new visitor, join us for free. If you are an existing member please login below. Note: for members who joined under our old messageboard system, please login with your display name not your login name.

Visually the Nebulas seem to be a logical heir and I suppose they were trying to recreate the pairing of the Connie and the Miranda, which I believe were very close to one another in most capacities, but the Nebula just wasn't designed to fill the role that the Mirandas seem to have acquired in the fleet. They're nearly at the level of a Galaxy, which is just unnecessary for a lot of fleet tasks. No, I'd say the logical heir would have to be something of a similar size and mission capability but with significant tech upgrades. I suppose something like the New Orleans or the Norways and Sabers might have been likely candidates but, for whatever reason, they weren't superior enough to warrant completely phasing out the older Mirandas. The Intrepids would make sense too, a bit farther down the timeline. None seems to have pushed them out as workhorses, though, although I imagine they've been gradually pushing the Mirandas into more background roles.

Maybe it has something to do with how adaptable the Miranda Class was, due to modular construction. We know it has interchangable mission pods for the "rollbar", but maybe that's not the only modularity to the design.

That idea works, but i love the excelsior and i think we should have seen more than 2 excelsior II's. and even one of those was an accident...

Thanks for answering my question!

It might be helpful to think of the Enterprise-B/Lakota as a variant then, and a rather uncommon one designed with a specific, rather uncommon mission goal in mind, rather than a refit. I do.

USS_Triumphant wrote:

Maybe it has something to do with how adaptable the Miranda Class was, due to modular construction. We know it has interchangable mission pods for the "rollbar", but maybe that's not the only modularity to the design.

Indeed, those big shuttle/cargo bay doors and various greeblies in the rear section almost beg for a high degree of modularity.

__________________
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

If you want (what I think) is the real reason: TPTB probably felt that since the Constitution Class Enterprise was a "hero" ship, there can't be another ship on screen that looked like it, since it could cause some confusion among the audience.
But that's just my two cents worth.

I would try to argue that no one thought the audience would be confusing the ship on screen with a "hero" ship when they showed all kinds of Galaxy class ships on DS9, but then considering how often I heard people say "is that the Enterprise?"...

If you want (what I think) is the real reason: TPTB probably felt that since the Constitution Class Enterprise was a "hero" ship, there can't be another ship on screen that looked like it, since it could cause some confusion among the audience.
But that's just my two cents worth.

I would try to argue that no one thought the audience would be confusing the ship on screen with a "hero" ship when they showed all kinds of Galaxy class ships on DS9, but then considering how often I heard people say "is that the Enterprise?"...

One must also consider the first time DS9 showed a Galaxy class, it was to blow it up to make a point. Afterward, all the ones we saw were after the Enterprise-D was (grumble) destroyed and it was technically no longer a Hero Ship.

TNG had overlap with the TOS movies, which is probably why they avoided showing operational Constitution class ships - even though it was 80 years later, they were still making the movies with them in them. Which in turn probably explains why there was never a CGI model made of it, which is why we didn't see them in action on DS9 or VGR.

__________________
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

If you want (what I think) is the real reason: TPTB probably felt that since the Constitution Class Enterprise was a "hero" ship, there can't be another ship on screen that looked like it, since it could cause some confusion among the audience.
But that's just my two cents worth.

I think that can be partly traced back to Gene Roddenberry, who vetoed the notion of an entirely new class representing the Enterprise in TMP. He seemed to think this would cause the audience to "forget" about the TOS incarnation.

To further confuse my earlier point, in TOS, whenever they showed another starship, it was almost always another Connie.

__________________
In all the history of the world, a riot has NEVER broken out at a Sci-Fi convention.

__________________
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

I think the main reason why Miranda's were abundant in the Dominion war was due to how the series creators wanted to make the battles scenes. The Dominion had big ships and little ships which are faster and since the Defiant is considered a prototype, I think they chose the Miranda to be the Starfleet equivalent to the Klingon Bird of Prey or The Dominion fighters. That way you have this nice effect of little ships weaving in between the big ships. I really think that was the only reason they were so common and the registries suggest a fair amount of them were built some time in the early 24th century making them not too old.

And no, the reason why Mirandas were in the DS9 fleet scenes was because ILM made a Miranda CGI model for FC which along with the Akira, SAber and Steamrunner, were given to CBS for use in DS9. It had nothing to do with how big or small the ships were.